The field of the present invention is directed to mobile telecommunications services and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for providing improved and adaptive radio frequency selection utilizing reference test stations and equipping user devices with synchronous adaptive radio selection modules.
The use of test stations in mobile and, in particular, cellular telecommunications systems is known, for example from U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,410,753; 6,219,544; 6,308,065 and 6,430,397. These patents generally described fixed or mobile test station apparatus that may additionally, in one embodiment, be wired to a base station rather than permitted merely to receive and transmit signals via wireless or radio frequency means. Clearly, mobile apparatus may have the additional feature of GPS or global positioning or may be located by base stations utilizing triangulation techniques whereby the mobile location of the mobile test station may be identified in geographic relation to one or more proximate transceiver base stations. The transmission quality within a cell may be monitored and parametric data collected including statistics directed to the location of a mobile at the time of data collection, the time of day and the radio frequencies and transmission reception levels of the signals. The collected data for directions of transmission to and from a base station may then be returned to a host operation and maintenance center where the data is processed and improvements to deficient parametric data planned for when compared with expected performance results.
Most cellular telecommunications applications today run over TCP. However, application performance may be enhanced if link layer information could be moved to higher levels of the OSI interconnect model and/or if network congestion could be minimized by providing bandwidth more appropriately suited to the application. Today, cellular phones are being utilized for the receipt and display of streaming video, for example, movies on demand applications requiring extremely high bandwidth at the same time as they are being utilized for instant messaging applications which require practically no bandwidth.
Notwithstanding the use of such known test stations and the improvements that may result from their use, there is still required a method and apparatus for, for example, optimizing use of both licensed and unlicensed radio frequency spectrum in both directions of transmission to and from a base station from an end user device during a real-time scenario where mobile traffic may be heavy in certain geographic areas surrounding a base station in relation to other base stations, i.e. a hot zone. In particular, the real-time problems that may require solution include but are not limited to congestion, radio frequency interference and enhanced wireless cost models for such high bandwidth requirement applications as streaming video. In particular, service level agreements impact the cost of the availability of certain frequencies for service provision and must be weighed against the real-time opportunity to utilize the available spectrum.